We painted while the kids were in WI with Nana and Grandpa’s.
We also thinned out the toys and junk lying around. It feels so much more relaxing now. All the clutter was stressful. I hated looking at it and having to pick it up all the time.
The wall above the couch needs something and I would love to have some red throw pillows, but that will come in time.
Ethan and Audrey have a closet. With shelves. Finally, it’s more than a little tiny room for Ethan to stuff all of his treasures. And when I say “treasures” I mean all the things that I was hoping to throw away because they are trash or junk.
Audrey is cute. More proof of that here. I love this little smile. I think she’s pretty. He likes to say “actually” all the time.
Isaac is also cute. I thought I would post this photo as evidence. I’m feeling a little blue today and thought that doing a strange blog post would help.
See? Wasn’t that fabulous? It’s much more interesting than this post, or this one, or even this one.
I would have posted a picture of Ethan too, but I’m having a lot of trouble posting pictures from blogger. I can do it from Picasa, but it only lets me post 4 at a time. Any thoughts on that? Anyone?
1. Measure carefully. Un-nailing a wall is actually harder than putting it together in the first place.
2. A hammer can do some pretty serious (and painful) damage to your finger if you let it.
3. Landscaping stones make good sledgehammers if one isn’t available. And bubble bottles can be screwed to the floor to be a makeshift doorstop.
4. Ethan wants to be a builder. He wanted to go and pretend to build in his room after I stopped working for the day. Oh, and he never hits his fingers with his hammer.
5. There’s more math to building than I realized. Mostly addition and subtraction, really, but lots of it.
6. Pay attention to how much space you have when you build a wall. If, say, you build it so that the top of the wall is under the end of the bed, this makes it tricky to stand said wall up. Hypothetically, that is, Of course.
7. I can actually build a wall!
We’ve been without a closet in our room for almost a year. For most of that time, we just had a rod hanging on the wall and a shelf. About two months ago, we made room for a closet and now, it is finally framed and so close to being ready for a door!
Daddy and Grandpa Fritz (I think both of them used to have different names– can’t seem to remember them now) worked really hard all day. They took out a chimney, patched the ceiling, shingled the place in the roof where it was, framed up the closed, hung some sheetrock, did a little mudding, drove to Menards, almost broke the truck, worked on the truck for a couple of hours, and some other things that I’m missing.
I was planning on taking the kids to church and then meeting Dad and Brian in Eden Prairie for lunch. Last night, I decided, that I would just drive to Cottage Grove and surprise Dad at his church. I know it was a lot of driving and gas is expensive, but it was worth it. The kids were out of the way for a little longer, I was able to take a little nap and I got to hug my brother and my dad. Dad and Brian don’t get hugged every day and Ethan and Audrey had some extras to share. It was really fun to surprise them!
When we got back this afternoon, the kids had fun playing with some of Grandpa Fritz’s tools and Audrey enjoyed chanting, “Grandpa” and pointing. She wanted all of us to know that she knew who “Grandpa” was. Ethan had been excited to get back too because he wanted to help Grandpa build some things.
It was a busy weekend.
Friday afternoon was crazy. I discovered the carpet in the basement was damp. Upon further discovery (opening the storage/utility room door) we found the source of the water. One of the airconditioner hoses came detatched. The result was a huge mess. Nathan came home a little early. I tossed a few things in the garbage and gave some instructions to the babysitter. I had set up to have Katarina (a girl who lives a couple blocks away)come over because I was leaving early to meet some friends for a scrapbooking weekend. Even though Nathan was here before I left, I still had her come over so he could get some stuff done without worrying about the kids.
There were 7 of us who stayed at my dad’s house for the weekend. One more person joined us for the day on Saturday. We completed 80 scrapbook pages, watched lots of episodes of The Office, ate good food and stayed up too late!
My turn to be back home! I spent the night last night at Dad’s.
The kids were happy to see me, but tired from not having good naps. Nathan did an awesome job of cleaning the house. Did I mention that the reason we were gone last weekend was because Nathan and his dad were working on our house?
Well, here is the result. I’m very, very happy with the work they did and it was cleaned up before we got home.
I’ll post pictures of the inside of the bedrooms later. They seem so much bigger now!
I’m so proud of my husband!
He worked all day sanding and painting Ethan’s room! Ethan was very excited when we got home.
Doing house projects with two toddlers is impossible– especially when we are working on one of their rooms. I didn’t have anyone who would have been able to take the kids all day so we took off last night and stayed at my dad’s. He had some appointments for work, but it worked out well. I just needed a place we could all be and where the kids could get naps. It worked well. It’s just a lot of organizing and shuffling people around anytime we need to get something done.
Nathan worked really hard. We have a lot working against us in trying to get this done- time constraints (only so many hours that the kids are able to be out of the way), our location which is 30 minutes one way from the nearest Menards or Home Depot and there aren’t a lot of resources in our little town, and the fact that Nathan has never done this kind of work on his own. It’s hard, messy and tedious!
Anyway, I’m thankful for the work that got done and proud of my husband.
